Introduction
The representation of women in media has long been a topic of debate and scrutiny. While society has made significant progress in terms of gender equality over the past century, it is important to examine whether these changes are reflected in the films we watch. Movies have the ability to reveal societal norms and ideals, as well as the underlying beliefs and attitudes that shape our culture.
For this data analysis project, we will be using the CMU Movie Summary Corpus dataset, as well as additional datasets from Stanford CoreNLP, IMDb, Wikidata, IMDB, and Box Office Mojo, to explore the portrayal of women in film, including the roles of actresses, characters, and writers and directors. Through our analysis, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of how women have been depicted in media over time and how this representation may have evolved. By examining these factors, we can gain insight into the ways that society views and treats women, and consider how far we have come in addressing gender inequality.
The Data
Our analysis is based on merging the CMU Dataset, the Stanford CoreNLP-processed summaries, IMDb, Wikidata, IMDB and Box office Mojo.
We have separated the data in three tables:
- The movies table, that contains titles, release year, runtime, box office revenue, average rating and number of votes on IMDb, genre, as well as the list of directors and writers. We have a total of 81’741 different movies.
- The characters table, that contains the ID of the movie, the character name and actor name, their height, ethnicity, birth and death year, the movie metric and the actor metric. We have 450’669 characters played by 135’761 different actors.
- The directors and writers table, that contains titles, role (either director or writer), name, gender, birth year and height. We have a total of 86’474 directors and 164’271 writers.